


Devil at the Crossroads

by Amand_r



Category: Highlander: The Series
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-21
Updated: 2011-04-21
Packaged: 2017-10-18 11:28:27
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,239
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/188448
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amand_r/pseuds/Amand_r
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They asked me to write something, but I'm not so big with writing Vet stories.  Maybe it's because I don't want to talk about the war, because really, who does?  Maybe it's because I blame the war for all the bad shit in my life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Devil at the Crossroads

**The Devil at the Crossroads**

by Joseph Dawson  
\------------------------------------------

They asked me to write something, but I'm not so big with writing Vet stories. Maybe it's because I don't want to talk about the war, because really, who does? Maybe it's because I blame the war for all the bad shit in my life. Maybe it's neither. Maybe I hated the war, but I learned something from it. Maybe to learn that lesson I needed to give them my legs. And I'll tell you what: I'm not sure what was the better end of the deal, really, so I guess I should impart my rambling wisdom in this magazine.

What did I learn in 'Nam? I found out there's no such thing as the real world. There is apparently, only a small construction that your mind creates. It is this construction that tells you which way is up, and which fork to use for salad. If this world clashes with those created by others, then you start to have a problem. And it's always _your_ problem, not anyone else's.

After I lost my legs, I was faced with the need to recreate the real world for myself. Everything was now structured around things I _couldn't_ do. As I lay there on that infirmary cot in the sweaty jungles of 'Nam, I started to make a list of things I had once enjoyed that were now no longer an option. Baseball. My family's Thanksgiving football game. Working in my pop's grain factory until I could take over the business. Lifting my niece up in the air and spinning around in the front lawn grass. Groping girls in the back of my old Chevy.

I think I held onto that list, expanding it, letting it unfurl in my head like the big red sail that would carry me into the world of being crippled, just another young vet in a castoff green coat. I clutched onto the reordering of the world, listening to shells explode in far off places with a hunger to be out there again, where I could let another mine finish me off and complete my list of desire.

That was probably the first time I felt a sense of utter detachment, of understanding that somehow I had to rewrite everything from scratch. The last time I checked, life doesn't give out owner's manuals, and so you can imagine how hard it is to let go and just realize that you have to "reboot".

When faced with a whole new form of existence, I could only think of uncertain things: What would Susan think? Would I finish college? When would I get to go home? Would I ever get to walk again? Of course, I would get to go home and I would walk again, but the college thing didn't work out, what with all the protesters pissing me off, and Susan most certainly did NOT know how to deal with my new body shape, no matter how tough a front she tried to put up.

When I got back to Chicago after my discharge, I figured that with nothing else to do except formulate a list of things I _couldn't_ do, I started to think about the guitar packed in the back of my closet. They used to say that the blues were created out of sadness, and that in the depths of darkness and hell are where they flourish with the best results.

They're only half-right. I have read since that most people who suffer from severe body trauma need a hobby in order to help them embrace the world again. At least, I think I read that somewhere.

I had always been a mediocre player, and being a good ol' boy from one of the greatest cities of jazz, playing the blues in particular had been a rather attractive past time. I think every boy goes through a phase where he feels the need to pick up a guitar and see what he's got. I was never an exception.

For a couple of weeks, I stared at the closet, wondering if the wheelchair could actually get in there, or if I would have to have someone get the instrument out for me. For a few more weeks I refused to ask anyone to get it for me, since it was up on a shelf, and I was rather…handicapped. Finally, I asked Susan to get the guitar out of the closet for me, which I guess was my final acceptance that my life had changed irrevocably and that there were going to be some things that I would need help with. It was a really hard lesson to learn, but the fact that Susan was soon gone and no longer a physical reminder of that lesson made it easier to accept.

I had to re-learn how to tune the guitar, but that wasn't so bad. Relearning how to make chords was rather difficult. I had moments where I had to adjust to being in the chair, and the guitar would bang against the sides, reminding me of where I was and what I was in. Sometimes it reminded me of how I got to be here.

But there was Hooker to play, and that great riff that King has in "The Thrill Is Gone." I spent days in my room, playing with the slide, trying to get my version of "I Can't Be Satisfied" to sound at least a little like Muddy's, before I realized that he played it a little differently each time, as if it wasn't meant to be something solid, something fixed.

That is what is interesting and saving about the blues: it isn't fixed. It's different all the time. That's what makes it so organic, so fluid, and so alive. I think it took me years of practice after that to understand what I was doing wrong before I could even start to get it right; you can't try to mimic the blues. You have to let that feeling resonant inside you until it's like a string you have just plucked, vibrating, and then you can let your fingers move to the same frequency, and then you're playing the blues. That the feeling just happens to be a few notes lower than happy is what makes it magic. I mean, they _do_ call it the Blues.

Have you ever played "Baby Goodbye" by Van Morrison? There's this high little thing he hits at the top of the riff that sounds like a pick, but its actually a mistake that Van made on the original track, so now you can only hear it on the Bang Masters album. Man, it took me days to figure that out. But it's that little mistake that makes the song. That high squeak that screams out how sad, and happy he is to leave the girl. He's going to her party, and he won't be able to stay, but he'll kiss her one last time and then he'll be goin away. It's like the anger that he won't let show, the feelings that he keeps bottled inside for any number of reasons, first and foremost, I think, because it's not manly. But then again, Van didn't seem to be concerned with his manliness. Maybe that's the way I see it, because every time I make that noise with my guitar now it's because was I too frustrated for words. Oh hell, I admit it; it's usually over a woman, too.

So the point of this little segue is to say that I had to recreate my life around the legs, around the pain, and around the changes that seemed to be happening even when I didn't want them. Not long after I was legless, I got a call from a guy who hired me in his for his research firm, and got some nifty legs that get me by. Then life went in, and I took the Blues with me. I'm not depressed by nature, but I can see the magic of the Blues, maybe because of 'Nam, maybe because I still am a good ol' boy at heart.

That guitar helped me to reshape the world then, a world where I was on plastic and metal, and I played catgut and steel. A world where I filed reports by day and played a semi-full house at night. It's not a bad world. It's a place that seems to notice that I'm not a whole man even while never telling me that directly. It makes the whole thing more bearable, really. I don't blame it, and it doesn't mock me.

I am true to every blues man's dream, though: I opened a bar. I'm not there all the time, and I don't raid too much of my own stash, though I imagine that in another life I would have become a drunk. Every night it's blues and booze and lonely looking ladies with hearts they're waiting to pour out into their empty wineglasses. And since this is my life, I have deigned to rule myself in this reality with a few rules: put one foot in front of the next, listen when a pretty lady says something, and count all the bottles at the end of every night, because your staff will pull one over on you, usually with the expensive rum.

As I get older, and the war gets farther and farther away, though, I begin to forget what my life was before I lost my legs. I forget what it was like to be free and running across a field, or riding on the back of the tractor holding the hitch to the wagon in with your boot. And as sentimental as that sounds, I am starting to realize that we make things for ourselves, lives, memories, careers, choices, even friendships, and they are the things that shape our reality. And when you don't conflict with what you've laid down for yourself, your reality is complete and whole.

So this thing has sat on my computer for a while, because I didn't know what to say about it, and I still don't, because it's all about the blues and life and reality, and the war, and no one really wants to read about that anyway, even if they did ask me to write it. I never did make a list of things that I _could_ do to balance the list of things that I couldn't. I never did get Susan back, and I certainly haven't found anyone to replace her, really.

But that's because the things that I can do I go and actually do, and the woman who can put up with all my bullshit deserves a medal, and the legs are the least of my bullshit at this point in life.

Instead, I want to end with a conversation I had the other day with a buddy I hang with. I'll just call him Adam. He wasn't in 'Nam, but he has been in a few conflicts, and I know that he understands what it was like, and that's a capital L in that word, man.

We were playing a slow, ambling version of "Irene, Goodnight," because he's only started to play the guitar again, and he likes the slide. Too much, if you ask me.

"So," he says, "you lost your legs, and for nothing." You guys have all heard this bit, right? But then he says. "Or was it worth it? Is there a trade off that war gave you that you hadn't had before?"

"Well," I told him, "if you're asking if I got something in exchange for losing them, the answer is no."

Adam doesn't seem to think this is strange, because he understands, I know, just like you will. No, it wasn't a trade off, and legs aren't currency. The lessons we all learned were in no way any form of reimbursement for our lost innocence or arms or eyes, but they shaped the realities that we made after, and man, sometimes those realities can be really fucked up.

Can I change this? No. But I got the blues and a sense of the real texture of the world. Could I have learned about these things outside of the war? I have no idea; but those kinds of questions are too much to contemplate.

I like to think about the story of how Robert Johnson went down to the crossroads one night and made a deal with the devil. When he got back the following morning, they say he could play anything he wanted on the guitar. I like to think that 'Nam was the Devil for me, because I think the metaphor fits me specifically, but maybe it's a little broader in application than I thought. Then again, a trade off woth the Devil is never really a trade off at all.

I was thinking about this when Adam ended the discussion in me head by saying, "Well, whatever yea learned over there, it made your sliding pick really fantastic."

And that's about all there is, really.

\-------------------------------------------------

 _Joe Dawson is a club owner and blues guitarist who has performed with such greats as James Moody, B.B. King, and Stevie Ray Vaughn. He runs and haunts Le Blues Bar in Paris. His unauthorized biography of missing musician Byron, titled "It Is Fit", is due out this November._


End file.
